Partnair flight 394
| Partnair flight 394 | |
|---|---|
 The crashed machine, 1987 |
|
| Accident summary | |
| Accident type | Loss of control due to the installation of several counterfeit spare parts, insufficient maintenance work |
| place | 18 km north of Hirtshals , Denmark |
| date | September 8, 1989 |
| Fatalities | 55 |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Injured | 0 |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | Convair 580 |
| operator | Partnair |
| Mark | LN-PAA |
| Departure airport | Oslo Airport Fornebu |
| Destination airport | Hamburg Airport |
| Passengers | 50 |
| crew | 5 |
| Lists of aviation accidents | |
Partnair flight 394 was a charter flight of the Norwegian airline Partnair from Oslo to Hamburg , the 50 employees of the Norwegian shipping company Wilh. Wilhelmsen on September 8, 1989. The passengers wanted to take part in a ship christening. The twin-engine Convair CV-580 crashed 18 kilometers north of the Danish port city of Hirtshals in the Skagerrak . All 55 people on board were killed.
To date (December 2019), the crash is the accident with the highest number of fatalities in Norwegian civil aviation .
Plane and crew
The Convair 580 was delivered to United Air Lines in 1953 as the Convair CV-340 equipped with piston engines ( Pratt & Whitney R-2800 ) . As a company aircraft owned by General Motors from 1959 , it was converted to turboprop engines of the Allison 501 type in 1960 , which changed the designation to Convair CV-580. From 1979 it was used by various airlines and was registered with the Partnair from May 1986 with the aircraft registration LN-PAA. The last major overhaul was carried out in the same year. At the time of the accident, she had completed a total of 36,943 flight hours and 15,116 landings.
The flight captain was 59-year-old Knut Tveiten, who had more than 16,000 hours of flight experience, of which over 1,200 hours were on board Convair 580. First officer and copilot was Finn Petter Berg, also 59 years old. Berg's experience was based on more than 16,000 flight hours, including over 11,000 as a captain. On board the CV-580, he had 675 hours of flight experience. In addition to two flight attendants , the crew also included a mechanic who was supposed to check the machine after landing in Hamburg.
Flight and crash
Even before the Convair took off from Fornebu Airport, the crew noticed that one of the two generators installed on the engines was defective. Since the Norwegian law stipulates that an aircraft may only take off if two functional power sources are available, Berg decided to use the auxiliary power unit (APU) from Convair. The prescribed two power sources were available and the start could be carried out. However, the pilots were not aware that one of the three brackets for the auxiliary power unit had broken. At 15:59 (UTC + 2) the aircraft took off for Hamburg.
The Convair reached its cruising altitude of approximately 6,700 meters (22,000 feet). The machine got into trouble near the Danish coast when the broken mount of the auxiliary power unit caused vibrations that affected the elevator . The vibrations increased, the aircraft became uncontrollable and crashed into the sea at 16:38.
Salvage
The wreckage of the machine was quickly found ( 57 ° 43 ′ 11 ″ N , 10 ° 4 ′ 52 ″ E, ). Danish rescue teams recovered the first corpses and wreckage floating on the sea surface. The rest of the wreck was located on the sea floor shortly afterwards. The wreckage covered an area several square kilometers. A total of 31 dead were found floating on the sea. Another 19 bodies were discovered in the wreck. The remaining five people were never found.
examination
The Norwegian Aviation Authority SHT ( Statens Havarikommisjon for Transport ) led the investigation into the accident.
The investigations led to the result that the Convair 580 could no longer be controlled due to a loss of control due to the destruction of the horizontal stabilizer. This was caused by strong vibrations triggered by the break in the brackets of the auxiliary power unit. The brackets showed strong signs of wear, they did not meet the original quality standards (hardness and resilience). Ultimately, the accident was triggered by the (unwittingly or consciously) installation of several counterfeit spare parts.
After the Lockerbie bombing of December 1988 in which a Boeing 747 of Pan American World Airways was destroyed by a bomb attack in the air and called 270 deaths, unproven there have been rumors that the machine had exploded on the flight 394 by a bomb. The following were indications for this:
- the breakup of the misfortune machine in midair
- the NATO exercise Sharp Spear carried out in the North Sea at the time of the accident
- the fact that the accident machine was used by the then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland .
Police investigations, in which two British experts who had investigated the Lockerbie attack, were called in, did not reveal any evidence of an explosion.
Media processing
The accident and the underlying problem of counterfeit spare parts for aircraft were first critically examined in 1994 in the ZDF report "Zündstoff: The risk flies with", first broadcast on March 4, 1994. In addition to the then AIBN chief investigator Finn Heimdal, relatives also had a say. The crash of Flight 394 was also the subject of the third episode of the seventh season of the Canadian documentary series Mayday - Alarm im Cockpit , which was broadcast in Germany under the title The Devil is in Detail (OT: Blown Apart ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ AIBN Report, Chapter 1.6.1.1, Page 8 (Eng.)
- ↑ AIBN Report, Chapter 3.2, Pages 109–112 (Eng.)
- ^ Accident report CV-580 LN-PAA , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on December 8, 2017.
- ↑ AIBN Report, Chapter 1.17.6.1, Page 78 (Eng.)